The Long Road

05/16/2003 Archived Entry: "Future of Dune"

Be warned, this is potentially filled with spoilers.

I’m almost done reading the Dune ‘house’ trilogy. Overall the books are pretty good but I found them to be too…predictable. For instance when a character is put in a life or death situation, it’s not very suspenseful when I know that that character is alive and well in ‘Dune’. I’m currently at the climax of House Corrino and the book is playing out exactly like I thought it would, not because I’ve read other Dune books but because all the dominos had been laid out so explicitly. Too explicitly.

Here is some conjecture on my part. In books 5 and 6 of the original series we learn that the distant colonies of man were being attacked by some new force so they started retreating back to the empire of a million worlds. Frank Herbert died before he could write book 7 so readers never found out what he intended to do with this ominous threat. Halfway through reading House Atreides, I started thinking that the thinking machines would be the mysterious enemies in the yet-to-be-written Dune7. There was nothing explicit to make me think that, just a few little details that I picked up on. First, House Atreides discussed the war on the machines a little more than I thought was ‘normal’, but maybe that was because the writers were trying to get us interested in the Butlerian Jihad. Which leads me to the second thing, the writers will be writing about the Butlerian Jihad. The thing is, they will be writing about the jihad BEFORE putting out Dune 7. It’s almost as if they were trying to prepare readers for it by giving them background info first. There were also some other vague, subtle things to lead down this train of thought. I won’t go over them but today, on page 374 of House Corrino a prescient character had this to say: “No time…Threat…outside force…evil…drawing closer…beyond the imperium…ancient enemy…future enemy”. That’s almost explicitly saying that the machines will be back. Unless humanity has an ancient enemy in the Dune universe that I don’t know of, it’s a pretty safe bet that the machines will be around in Dune 7.

Replies: 1 Comment

In reading things the authors have written, their reason for writing the Butlerian Jihad books before Dune 7 was to better aquaint themselves with the Dune universe so they could do a better job of completing Frank Herbert's original vision.

Oh and hey, they have his original notes of what was to come, eh? So it's not as if they're making it up on their own.

I agree with you though, I remember reading that line from House Corrino and thinking, Hmmm... so that's to come, is it? And that's without having read books 5 and 6 yet.

Posted by Romer @ 05/16/2003 01:12 AM EST